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“Filling The Void: A Chance To Soar,”
by Herbert Muschamp (Sept. 30, 2001)
The terrorists left many voids besides the loss of human lives and two big footprints in the earth. Holes in the social fabric, fissures in the patterns of public and private life, emotional as well as physical disruptions in the streets where public and private intersect. Many futures got blown out of the water. Nothing will take their place. Meaning collapsed with the towers. Read more »

“Lost and Found,”
by Colson Whitehead (Nov. 11, 2001)
I’m here because I was born here and thus ruined for anywhere else, but I don’t know about you. Maybe you’re from here, too, and sooner or later it will come out that we used to live a block away from each other and didn’t even know it. Or maybe you moved here a couple years ago for a job; maybe you came here for school. Read more »

“Which Way Did He Run?”
by David Grann (Jan. 13, 2002)
Firemen have a culture of death. There are rituals, carefully constructed for the living, to process the dead. And so on Sept. 11, when members of Engine Company 40, Ladder Company 35 discovered that every man from their house who responded to the World Trade Center attack — 12, including a captain and a lieutenant — had disappeared, they descended on the site in droves, prepared, at the very least, to perform the rite of carrying out their own. Read more »Read more…

The most original American tennis writer (and not a bad player in his youth) on the greatest all-around player of his time. A classic:

“Federer as Religious Experience”
by David Foster Wallace (Aug. 20, 2006)
Almost anyone who loves tennis and follows the men’s tour on television has, over the last few years, had what might be termed Federer Moments. These are times, as you watch the young Swiss play, when the jaw drops and eyes protrude and sounds are made that bring spouses in from other rooms to see if you’re O.K. Read more »

What gives Rafa such heart? A quest to find out:

“Ripped? (Or Torn Up?)”
by Cynthia Gorney (June 17, 2009)
There was no moon over the tennis stadium, but it was after midnight, the risers still crowded, and Rafael Nadal was playing the Argentine David Nalbandian. This was in Indian Wells, Calif., three months ago, at a tournament in the desert called the BNP Paribas Open. Read more »

One of the oddest of tennis rivalries turns out to be weirder than you think. (Read the article by Peter de Jonge – in PDF form, with some of the photographs excised, for technical reasons not worth pondering on a holiday weekend.)

“When Asked What He Likes About Agassi…”
by Peter de Jonge (Aug. 27, 1995)
Early on the morning of March 27, Pete Sampras, then the No. 1-ranked tennis player in the world, and Andre Agassi, No. 2 with a bullet, boarded a Concorde jet in New York City to fly to London and then on to Sicily to represent the United States in a Davis Cup match against Italy. Not since 1984, when Jimmy Connors and John McEnroe seemed to own the sport, had two Americans been locked in such a furious competition. Read more »

“Baby Makes Four, and Complications,”
by N.R. Kleinfeld (June 19, 2011)
At the apartment in Brooklyn where George Russell spends four nights each week, he checked the clock: 7:09 p.m. Wasn’t it 7:05 about 20 minutes ago? Never had time moved so slowly. Was the clock even working? Read more »

“The Two-Minus-One Pregnancy,”
by Ruth Padawer (Aug. 10, 2011)
As Jenny lay on the obstetrician’s examination table, she was grateful that the ultrasound tech had turned off the overhead screen. She didn’t want to see the two shadows floating inside her. Since making her decision, she had tried hard not to think about them, though she could often think of little else. Read more »

Reuters

“Getting the Girl,”
by Lisa Belkin (July 25, 1999)
There is nothing sleek or high-tech about this third-floor conference room in Fairfax, Va., except, perhaps, the bright red laser pointer that skitters across the eerie greenish slide of phosphorescent sperm. Read more »

“Can Europe be Saved?”
by Paul Krugman (Jan. 12, 2011)
There’s something peculiarly apt about the fact that the current European crisis began in Greece. For Europe’s woes have all the aspects of a classical Greek tragedy, in which a man of noble character is undone by the fatal flaw of hubris. Read more »

Damon Winter/The New York Times

“Heading Off the Next Financial Crisis,”
by David Leonhardt (March 25, 2010)
A public good is something that the free market tends not to provide on its own, to the detriment of society. Pollution laws and police departments are classic examples. In the case of finance — and of the crisis of the past two years — this missing good has been strong regulation. Read more »

Brendan Mcdermid/Reuters

“Riding the Mo in the Lime Green Glow,”
by Matthew Klam (Nov. 21, 1999)
The stock market opens and Dave Goehl immediately makes a $230 profit on 500 shares of eGroup, which he bought yesterday, by accident. Dave is buying and selling securities on the Nasdaq exchange in his shorts and a T-shirt from the convenience of his spare bedroom. ”It’s the neatest thing in the world,” he says. Read more »

Guido Scarabottolo

“The End of the Financial World as We Know it,”
by Michael Lewis and David Einhorn (Jan. 3, 2009)
Americans enter the New Year in a strange new role: financial lunatics. We’ve been viewed by the wider world with mistrust and suspicion on other matters, but on the subject of money even our harshest critics have been inclined to believe that we knew what we were doing. Read more »

“Bad Food? Tax It, and Subsidize Vegetables,”
by Mark Bittman (July 23, 2011)
What will it take to get Americans to change our eating habits? The need is indisputable, because heart disease, diabetes and cancer are all, in large part, caused by the Standard American Diet. (Yes, it’s SAD.) Read more »

“Is Sugar Toxic?” by Gary Taubes (April 13, 2011)
On May 26, 2009, Robert Lustig gave a lecture called “Sugar: The Bitter Truth,” which was posted on YouTube the following July. Since then, it has been viewed well over 800,000 times, gaining new viewers at a rate of about 50,000 per month, fairly remarkable numbers for a 90-minute discussion of the nuances of fructose biochemistry and human physiology. Read more »

Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times

“Unhappy Meals” by Michael Pollan (January 27, 2007)
Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants. That, more or less, is the short answer to the supposedly incredibly complicated and confusing question of what we humans should eat in order to be maximally healthy. I hate to give away the game right here at the beginning of a long essay, and I confess that I’m tempted to complicate matters in the interest of keeping things going for a few thousand more words. Read more »

“Kei Igawa: The Lost Yankee,”
by Bill Pennington (July 23, 2011)
TRENTON — In the middle of a bright Manhattan summer afternoon, the Yankees’ $46 million pitcher steps from his fashionable East Side apartment building and slips into a waiting Lexus for a chauffeured ride to the ballpark. Read more »

Damon Winter/The New York Times

“Empire of Evolution,”
by Carl Zimmer (July 25, 2011)
To study evolution, Jason Munshi-South has tracked elephants in central Africa and proboscis monkeys in the wilds of Borneo. But for his most recent expedition, he took the A train. Dr. Munshi-South and two graduate students, Paolo Cocco and Stephen Harris, climbed out of the 168th Street station lugging backpacks and a plastic crate full of scales, Ziploc bags, clipboards, rulers and tarps. Read more »

Photo illustrations by Curtis Mann for The New York Times

“Yemen on the Brink of Hell,”
by Robert F. Worth (July 20, 2011)
On May 29, a young woman named Bushra al- Maqtari joined a group of several thousand protesters marching down a trash-strewn boulevard in the Yemeni city of Taiz. The Arab world’s democratic uprising was five months old, and patience among the protesters in Taiz — Yemen’s second largest city — was wearing thin. Read more »

This week’s selection of “long reads” hails from all over the globe, from Second Avenue to Port-au-Prince to Okemos, Mich.:

Hiroko Masuike/The New York Times

“In the East Village, Waiting for the Wrecking Ball,” by Cara Buckley (July 15, 2011)
In the beginning, there were two buildings. Eleven Second Avenue was squat, ugly and three stories tall. Its neighbor, 9 Second Avenue, was a five-story tenement. They sat next to each other on the west side of Second Avenue, between Houston and East First Streets. Read more »

Moises Saman for The New York Times

“In Scarred Syria City, a Vision of a Life Free From Dictators,” by Anthony Shadid (July 19, 2011)
HAMA, Syria — In this city that bears the scars of one of the modern Middle East’s bloodiest episodes, the revolt against President Bashar al-Assad has begun to help Syrians imagine life after dictatorship as it forges new leaders, organizes its own defense and reckons with a grim past in an uncertain experiment that showcases the forces that could end Mr. Assad’s rule. Read more »

“Law School Economics: Ka-Ching!” by David Segal (July 16. 2011)
With apologies to show business, there’s no business like the business of law school. The basic rules of a market economy — even golden oldies, like a link between supply and demand — just don’t apply. Legal diplomas have such allure that law schools have been able to jack up tuition four times faster than the soaring cost of college.Read more »

Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times

“The Would-Be Prince of Port-au-Prince,” by Anand Giridharadas (July 15, 2011)
Wyclef Jean was in a rare state: nervous. He was trying to stick to his new role of wonky Haitian statesman, but the road kept distracting him. We were driving through Port-au-Prince as dusk fell, and he would interrupt his own discourse on trade rules or egg imports to ask the driver why a fire was burning on the roadside or to complain that our headlights were tempting danger or to mumble that the police escort, which he suspected of working for the opposition, shouldn’t sound its sirens. Read more »

For the second week running, we’ve collected the best long-form journalism in The Times. A new shortlist will be posted every Friday afternoon on The 6th Floor blog, as well as on our Longreads page. If you follow #Longreads on Twitter, you’ll be able to find our picks that way too.

Philip Scott Andrews/The New York Times

“3, 2, 1, and the Last Shuttle Leaves an Era Behind,” by John Noble Wilford (July 8, 2011)
KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — There was a time, some of us remember, when a countdown at Canaveral stopped the world in its tracks. On television or at the launching, every breath was held at liftoff and every eye followed the fiery plume of ascent, up and away. Read more »

“Hasidic Sleuth’s Beat: The Mean Streets of Brooklyn,” by Jed Lipinski (July 8, 2011)
Joe Levin, a private investigator in Brooklyn, was waiting to meet a new client in the parking lot of a kosher supermarket in Borough Park one recent morning. Glancing in the side-view mirror of his chauffeured sport utility vehicle, Mr. Levin said he liked this particular spot because he knew the manager, the delivery man and the security guard, who lets him borrow footage from the lot’s surveillance equipment. Read more »

Don Hunstein/Sony Music Archives

“A-R-E-T-H-A,” by Rob Hoerburger (July 8, 2011) Aretha Franklin sat alone with a Coke. It was the night of her 69th birthday, and all around, guests were filing into the Park Room at the Helmsley Park Lane Hotel on Central Park South, bobbing to live music from the vibraphonist Roy Ayers or the mambo prince Tito Puente Jr. Franklin has given herself big birthday parties before, but this one had a certain urgency. Read more »

Rick Scibelli Jr. for The New York Times

“A Harvest of Years and Bulbs,” by Ann Raver (July 13, 2011)
DIXON, N.M. — It was a cool morning at El Bosque Garlic Farm when we gathered for the garlic harvest a few weeks ago. Named after the Spanish word for forest, these bottomland fields nestle in a valley between the Embudo River, a rocky tributary of the Rio Grande, and the rounded sandy red foothills of the Sangre de Cristo range. Read more »

“In Search of a Robot More Like Us,” By John Markoff (July 13, 2011)
MENLO PARK, Calif. — The robotics pioneer Rodney Brooks often begins speeches by reaching into his pocket, fiddling with some loose change, finding a quarter, pulling it out and twirling it in his fingers. Read more »

Carolyn Drake for The New York Times

“A Turkish Idyll Lost in Time,” by Liesl Schillinger (July 8, 2011)
Late on a peaceful night in May, on a quiet island in the Sea of Marmara, I walked alone on a curving street edged by walls dripping with ivy. Behind the walls, palms and red pines loomed above Ottoman mansions that drowsed in the leafy darkness. With no sound but my own footsteps, I continued down a slope that led to my seafront hotel. Read more »

This is the debut of a regular feature: a collection of the week’s best long-form journalism published in The Times, as selected by our editors. We will also include one pick from The Times’s archives. A new shortlist will be posted every Friday afternoon on The 6th Floor blog, as well as on our Longreads page. If you follow #Longreads on Twitter, you’ll be able to find our picks that way, too.

Tyler Hicks/The New York Times

“Better Lives for Mexicans Cut Allure of Going North,”
by Damien Cave (July 6, 2011)
The extraordinary Mexican migration that delivered millions of illegal immigrants to the United States over the past 30 years has sputtered to a trickle, and research points to a surprising cause: unheralded changes in Mexico that have made staying home more attractive. Read more »

“American Artist Who Scribbled a Unique Path,”
by Randy Kennedy (July 5, 2011)
Cy Twombly, whose spare, childlike scribbles and poetic engagement with antiquity left him stubbornly out of step with the movements of postwar American art even as he became one of the era’s most important painters, died on Tuesday in Rome. He was 83.Read more »

Jeremy M. Lange for The New York Times

“A City’s Wrenching Budget Choices,”
by Kevin Sack (July 4, 2011)
WILMINGTON, N.C. — When Engine 5 pulled up to a burning house on Woodlawn Avenue early on March 19, the firefighters were told that a man might be trapped in the back left bedroom. As two firemen trained a hose toward that corner, Capt. Don Ragavage crawled through smoke and flames to search for the missing resident. Read more »

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

“Love and Inheritance: A Family Feud,”
By John Leland (July 2, 2011)
If you could script your life, how would it play out? Make movies, win an Academy Award, own an enormous apartment on Central Park West and then, in your declining years, marry someone half your age? Read more »

Illustrations by Ciara Phelan; Photographs from Corbis

“Married, With Infidelities,”
by Mark Oppenheimer (June 30, 2011)
Last month, when the New York congressman Anthony Weiner finally admitted that he had lied, that his Twitter account had not been hacked, that he in fact had sent a picture of his thinly clad undercarriage to a stranger in Seattle, I asked my wife of six years, mother of our three children, what she thought. Read more »

Lewis Whyld/Getty Images

“Tabloid Hack Attack on Royals, and Beyond,”
by Don Van Natta Jr., Jo Becker and Graham Bowley (September 1, 2010)
In November 2005, three senior aides to Britain’s royal family noticed odd things happening on their mobile phones. Messages they had never listened to were somehow appearing in their mailboxes as if heard and saved. Equally peculiar were stories that began appearing about Prince William in one of the country’s biggest tabloids, News of the World. Read more »
An earlier version of this posting omitted the original publication dates of these articles.

Like drinking, music is seasonal, I think. And as I explain in my November Drink column, late autumn is definitely folk-music prime time for me. Cider seems to go down better to a soundtrack of eerie ballads and tragic old love songs, many of them dating back hundreds of years. I favor British folk and folk-rock artists like Shirley Collins, Ewan MacColl and Martin Carthy — and above all Sandy Denny, who died in 1978 at 31. (By then she’d made her mark with the legendary folk-rock outfit Fairport Convention, but she might forever be best known for her ethereal vocals on Led Zeppelin’s “Battle of Evermore.”) Her voice, at once primal and refined, is like a solitary walk through the woods in late autumn. As for younger British musicians, I’m smitten with the Unthanks, a Northumbrian band fronted by the sisters Rachel and Becky Unthank, whose rich, haunting harmonies are just right. But I can’t resist some of the greatest traditional American singers either — especially Jean Ritchie and Ralph Stanley.

I couldn’t find clips for every song I included on the playlist, but I found some. Here they are, with a few other folky fall favorites by artists it pained me to leave off the shortlist, Bert Jansch and Nic Jones. (O.K., the Jones song has a happy ending, but I’m including it anyway because it’s so good.)